Project Summary

Find a single study from the WAI database where subjects of different sex, race, ethnicity, or age groups were enrolled.

Research Interest

I was particularly interested about differences in mean absorbance between race. However, exploring the Subjects dataframe taught me that very few studies were examining racial demographics.

Findings

Rosowski et al. (2012) is a study that took a unique approach to race.

SELECT Frequency, Race,
    AVG(Absorbance) AS ave_absorbance
FROM Subjects AS s
INNER JOIN Measurements AS m ON m.SubjectNumber = s.SubjectNumber
WHERE m.Identifier = "Rosowski_2012" AND s.Identifier = "Rosowski_2012" 
AND Frequency > 200 AND Frequency < 8000
GROUP BY Race, Frequency;

Implications

Rosowski et al.’s findings suggest that there were differences in average absorbance across “races”. However, the races are incredibly limited, and isolate Chinese from Asian.

• What does this mean for conclusions regarding race?

• How do we even classify race?

However, the data to support these claims is insufficient. Are black individuals truly less likely to experience hearing loss, or it just underreported?